


Hanging Fire

by thatyourefuse



Series: Devil Town AU and related matters [1]
Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: Agoraphobia, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Edward Spellman was one dodgy motherfucker, Gen, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?, Zelda is deeply weird about family, author's new england is showing, canon-typical grey and gray morality, canon-typical poor childrearing practices, canon-typical prickly class subtext, lies and the lying liars who tell them, mostly to herself in this instance, originally posted to fan-flashworks, shady bastards smoking on park benches, witches and witch hunters, you say familiar I say emotional support dog
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-28
Updated: 2019-02-28
Packaged: 2019-11-06 18:45:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17945090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatyourefuse/pseuds/thatyourefuse
Summary: --absurd, clearly.(Ten years earlier: Edward has a grand design, Zelda has serious reservations about it, and the Kinkle grudge continues totally unfaded.)





	Hanging Fire

**Author's Note:**

> A preliminary slice of anxiety and questionable diplomatic choices from early in the timeline of a fairly enormous AU I'm roughing out: Edward and Diana never married, the plane crash never happened, everything's made up, and the points don't matter.
> 
> Originally posted in slightly rougher form to [fan-flashworks](https://fan-flashworks.dreamwidth.org/) @ DW for their "Throw" challenge and "The Other Side" square on my bingo card.

** Ten Years Earlier **

\-- _absurd_ , clearly. Coaxing the long black Imperial stepwise into a curbside space on Hudson Street between the toyshop -- its window heaped with decaying tinsel and sunbleached plastic trucks -- and the Hill Town All-Nite Laund-Ro-Mat: absurd, truly, laughable, if Zelda were at all in her right mind. On comparable occasions, she remembers, she has, and this entire grand design of Edward's has been nothing more nor less --

Curled politely on the passenger seat, Vinegar Tom whuffs: "if the thing _will_ be miserable, why draw it out?"

"Hush, you." The key snags in the ignition when she tries to draw it out; again, a third time, not relenting until she's taken one hitching breath and allowed her hands to stretch and clasp together. Closed, open, an inexcusable thin white rind of wear at the tip of one Fire and Ice index finger, she could -- she _could_ be anywhere, if she so pleased. She could be walking in the woods. She could be on the porch at home, drinking mulled cider laced with Calvados, tilting back in her deckchair to take the watery rays of October sun while she waited to hear the door creak open at her back. Nothing would have stopped her, had she insisted. She must have chosen, herself, submission to this fool's errand.

Vinegar Tom whines and casts his eyes up; no need for him to drive his point home by speech, only by the thump of his tail against the seatback to pop open each front-door latch.

Zelda drums her fingers across the steering wheel, hands splayed end to end. She steps out of the car. She feeds three quarters into a rust-chipped parking meter and adjusts her stole on her shoulders. So close to the center of town, the bricks underfoot are clean and tolerably even, but all the same her shoes catch in the mortar with every second or third step. If Hilda had deigned to invite herself along, she might say _oh, my kingdom for some proper concrete_ , she might say _sod the colored postcards, what else is the twentieth century for_ , and Zelda might exhale sharply and widen her eyes in concurrence; more likely, Hilda would trip along babbling at her side without saying a blasted thing, and Zelda would take comfort at the very least in knowing that she, herself, wasn't babbling twice as loudly in her own thoughts.

She rounds the corner of Hudson and Second Street, her familiar at her heels, just as the wind changes: an east wind, lifting her hair, ruffling her stole and the trim on her coat-cuffs as she waits unpatiently at the crosswalk. A woman with an uncommonly placid dog trotting by her side, pinned in place on a curb by the wind and the traffic lights on her way to a stroll in the park; that woman could be simply anyone. Zelda could be -- catlike she could laze in the hideous club chair in Edward's study, warming her feet at the fire, languidly pretending to debate his latest overconfident translation of the _Liber Ivonis_. She could be anywhere at all, anywhere safe at home, rather than pacing through the town square in her pride and her unsuitable shoes, towards the rag of yellowing grass at its center.

Murchison Park, since the streets were laid with asphalt, is a sorry scrap of a thing in any case: a wisp of lawn and stunted ash trees, barely wider than the town roads that contain its downhill course along four blocks of Greendale. Rising at the far end, the questionable redbrick Gothic of the public library, dragged down at its hem by its blockish modern extension; scattered over the grass, a handful of mortal teenagers, self-consciously lounging with their jackets unbuttoned as though to demand the last traces of warmth the sun can provide; and on a bench at the foot of a thoroughly implausible statue of Paul Revere, Lemuel Kinkle in a navy-blue watch cap tugged down over the tips of his ears, flanked by two solemn, wary mortal children -- boys -- twelve and perhaps seven, she'd make them, in worn brown barn coats each the image of their grandfather's.

Vinegar Tom's nails tick on the pavement at her side.

The man doesn't condescend to acknowledge her before she's well within reach; then he drags his eyes from her ankles to her hairline, slowly and matchlessly uninterested, as though she were -- rather, even, than a woman; rather than quarry -- something thorny and cumbersome that had fallen inconveniently across his front walk.

"They got leash laws in this town now, y'know, lady," he says.

"I'm certain they have."

The younger boy leans forward, his Dickensian eyes flickering back and forth between the dog at her feet and the foxes draped around her neck. Kinkle stops just shy of spitting through his teeth: "don't mess with her, Harvey," he says, not turning. "She'll pull your teeth out soon as look at you and string 'em on a necklace. She's got one like that at home already. I seen her wearing it."

"Or _not_ ," the older boy says, nothing like quietly enough. 

With incongruous stage-magic tidiness, the man produces a grubby baseball from his jacket pocket; it sits like an apple in his open palm. "Okay, smart-aleck," he says -- not unfondly, Zelda thinks, believes, hopes. "Why don't you two run down that way so you can try and teach your brother to tell his can from his changeup. Don't get out of my sight, though, hear me?

"Short one already gets his ass kicked in _flag_ football," he adds, with the boys presumably out of earshot. "But he'd have an okay eye if he'd quit trying to hide from the ball. Sit down. You ever have kids?"

"Never," she says, clipped. Some perverse remaining ego -- _beyond_ laughable, to think he'd honor the accomplishment, even were she a mortal, even were he to realize it -- prompts her to add, "I've delivered a fair number of them."

"Yeah? You use that hoodoo to keep your fancy dress clean?" He emits a sound somewhere between a cough and a cackle, and fishes a worse-for-wear pack of Lucky Strikes from another pocket. "I'd pay to see that, but I'd rather see you had a light."

Purely as an arrogant gesture she snaps the flame into life between two empty fingers, makes a production of finding her own cigarette case and holder. It gives her a silk-thin excuse, at any rate, to force her hands into slow deliberate movement; Vinegar Tom sighs and settles his weight against her leg as though she hadn't tried for an excuse at all.

"Haven't seen _you_ in a while, anyway," Kinkle says, still gazing pointedly away from her. "Your brother off sick today, is he? Or is he getting some idea this is shitwork he can offload on anyone else with their nose high enough in the air, 'cause I can tell you he ain't been making friends that way."

A few yards away, his older grandson dodges around a long-haired laughing girl on roller skates. Zelda could be drawing a hot bath with jasmine oil, she could be collating sheet-music for tomorrow's practice, she could be lying on the cool forest floor with the wind in her mouth and red leaves crackling into her hair -- pull up the thrumming unhuman life of the place through her palms flat in the soil -- 

"I wasn't aware you normally brought the children," she replies. "Are we blooding in the next generation so early, or did your son find himself indisposed again this morning? My sister could prepare him a remedy that does wonders."

"You _people_ ," Kinkle says, after a moment. "You all think you're the only ones that remember. I tell your brother once a month and I'm telling you now, sweetheart -- you wanted to live in this town like rats under the floorboards, that was fine with everyone, but us human beings haven't forgotten what it was like when you thought you owned the place."

For another moment, silent side by side, they could nearly be allies: family, even, long-estranged, sealed up each alone in calcified resentment, meeting to finalize some tawdry and exhausting bit of legal business. _Nothing will come of nothing_.

"Not all your fault, maybe," he adds, in a tone of great and magnanimous concession. "If coexistence for a rat means spreading fleas and pissing in the sugar bowl, maybe that's just its nature. But I tell your brother once a month, he's a fool if he thinks no one knows that's what he's peddling, and now I'm telling you to pass on to him I said it again. Now let's hear what we got to talk about this time."

**Author's Note:**

> * It started out as Shirley Jackson and took a turn for the John Le Carre. IDEFK, guys.
>   
> 
> * [The 1964 Imperial LeBaron](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b6/Imperial_Front.jpg) ([and reverse angle](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Imperial_Rear.jpg)): truly, a car for the witch who likes other drivers to stay _well_ clear. I mean, can't you just see that?
>   
> 
> * As far as I can tell, Harvey's grandfather doesn't have a canonical first name yet. As a former BSG fan dealing with this show of all shows, I was inappropriately delighted with the opportunity to hang an even more difficult-to-carry Biblical name on Michael Hogan.
>   
> 
> * On one hand I probably should not be allowed to _touch_ a canon that lets me put in as many genre in-jokes as I want; on the other hand, said canon straight-up stole an entire character name from _We Have Always Lived In The Castle_ , so this is basically my hometown. (In a lot of ways, because I have lived with chronic anxiety in smallish-town New England for twenty years, and… ahahahaha Zelda is _so much fun_ for me to write.)


End file.
